Two years ago Pogostuck: Rage With Your Friends released on Steam, so today marks the day of its second anniversary! My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has played the game! ːwinter2019happybulbː
To celebrate both map 1 and map 2 now feature some more or less subtle birthday decoration for one week. Let's have a look at what else has changed in the most recent and the previous two patches:
The Sleepy Hat had been temporarily replaced with a red Santa Hat over the festive season. As some people enjoyed differently colored hats I've implemented an item color system, allowing players to choose their own hat colors. This only works for the Sleepy Hat for now but might be expanded to other items in the future. Additionally, you can now set the background color in the video options menu if you prefer to play with background rendering switched off:
The replay interface (which can be found by selecting a replay from the leaderboard while playing map 1 or map 2) has been reworked and improved. It now features the ability to easily toggle between multiple replays and to even manipulate them in sync:
The matchmaking usually only looks for lobbies halfway around the globe. In some scenarios this could lead to players from certain regions to only be able to play with a handful of other players unless they manually joined lobbies. To combat this a so called Lobby distance filter (to be found in the in-game Friends menu) has been introduced where players can choose between standard and now world-wide searches. The downside of being matched with players from all around the globe is potentially fluctuating ping or even packet loss, leading to other players seemingly teleporting around the map.
For multiple weeks before the release of map 2 I was trying to add an object or a mechanic at 650m+ and onward that prevented many of the deep falls (in particular those from 800m down to 550m or 450m even). The issue was that all of those conflicted with the general gameplay and intended route going up in that section. At launch a big but invisible jellyfish from the loot mode was in the map still, stemming from my last attempt of trying to prevent said falls.
With patch 20 I finally added a helping wind similar to that in map 1 next to the moais:
This wind slightly guides you onto the pillar below falling down, possibly allowing for a recovery jump. It's very well possible still to fall in the gap between. Please note from my previous paragraph that this has always been the intended design of that area, I just didn't know how to implement it gracefully.
Also, the movement of the ladybugs in the early slopes area of map 2 has been adjusted so they no longer block the view on the player and the pogo stick. This was unwanted behavior because of its random nature, in stark contrast to the static clover leaves in the same area that might block your view as well.
The updates furthermore include general bug fixes, including a mean bug where one or two bytes behind long menu text strings could be overwritten in some cases. This might have randomly led to erroneous behavior and crashes in the past, so general stability should be improved now.
A more robust save system has been introduced that prevents the rare loss of progress or a false change in game modes when the mode framework is changed internally.
Thank you for reading, have fun and see you at the top!